Families and London Buses

       Yes, we all know the Tolstoy quote about families, although we have to pause a bit to get it right that happy families are all happy in the same way but it is the unhappy families where the unhappiness stems from an infinite variety of causes.

       Actually, now I check, he said, “All happy families resemble one another: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

       I have just finished reading—more or less in parallel--two books about families, and I would strongly recommend both of them. They are “The Green Road” by Anne Enright and “A Spool of Blue Thread” by Anne Tyler.

       Anne Enright’s family could not, of course, be anything other than Irish. And Anne Tyler’s family could not be anything other than Baltimoreans—not the Baltimore residents of The Wire (in which I was often an extra) but residents of the areas of fine old houses on leafy streets. Indeed, The Spool of Blue Thread is as much a book about a house as about the three generations of the family that live in the house.

       The Green Road starts with the Madigan family when the four children were young and the elder boy, Dan, came back from the university and announced that he wanted to be a priest. Rosaleen, the mother, took to her bed in great distress, apparently her usual response to what she saw as distressing news (“the horizontal solution”). We then meet the children one by one in later years. Dan in New York at the peak of the AIDS epidemic: Emmet, the second boy, working for an NGO in an African country: Constance in a local hospital having a scan for possible cancer: and Hanna, the youngest, an actress not getting parts, struggling with drink and a baby in Dublin. And we then move on to a Christmas when the family reunites for the first time for years. And Rosaleen’s complicated relations with her children, and their complicated relations with each other, become the focus of the rest of the novel.

       Anne Enright has a wonderful way of choosing her words. I just open a page at random, and here is a brief paragraph:

       “It was nearly April. A dappled kind of day. The clean light caught the drops on the windowpane in all their multiplicity while, outside, a thousand baby leaves unfurled against branches black with rain.”

       Another: “…the islands sleeping out in the bay, the clouds running their shadows across the water, the Atlantic surging up the distant cliffs in a tranced silent plume of spray.”

       Well worth reading.

       Anne Tyler—this her 20^th novel—does follow the path of most of her earlier novels in dealing with the complications of family life, usually set in the better-off areas of Baltimore, where she lives. She was much admired by the late John Updike and by Nick Hornby. Others have seen her as a purveyor of saccharin. One critic pronounced her:

“…America’s “foremost NutraSweet novelist”, her “annoyingly synthetic” fiction “seriously diluted by the promiscuous use of artificial sweeteners”; what she offers are “sedative resolutions to life’s most grievous and perplexing problems.”

       Certainly, in this novel we are not confronted with seriously tragic situations—there are no suicides or drug overdoses, minimal sex, and the problems are those that confront many families—the black sheep, the jealousy of one child for another, the competition for parental love. We do go back a generation in the family and discover how the patriarch—oddly nicknamed Junior—and his wife Linney started their marriage in a wholly unconventional way.

       Kate Kellaway in The Guardian, writes as follows, and neatly sums up what I felt about the novel:

       “The extraordinary thing about all her writing is the extent to which she makes one believe every word, deed and breath. A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th, is no exception. What is most remarkable about it is the extent to which Tyler is able to relax into an ordinary, homely minor key while keeping one as absorbed as if it were one’s own family she were describing, and as if what happened to them were necessary reading. The book is no less eventful than ordinary life – and that turns out to be more than enough.”

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       The New Yorker notes briefly a few books each week and I saw that one was about buses in London. It’s called “The Maintenance of Headway,” by Magnus Mills, an author I had never heard of, although I note he has written other novels and was once short-listed for the Booker prize. The few sentences of the review mentioned a dry British sense of humour. I am a bit puzzled that it has been published in the USA: I would doubt there is an American audience for it. It is an interesting book for those who love to ride the London buses, well-written, and—yes—quietly funny in a variety of ways, but a somewhat slight offering. I finished it in an afternoon—just 150 odd pages in a small format. A curiosity, really, by a good writer who did drive a bus in London. It was first published in England in 2009.